Saturday, 21 December 2013

Didn’t expect it to take this long, really, but there you go. A
“real” magician (of some kind, if you can call an apparent fan of the
pseudo-rosicrucian quasi-theosophical “New Thought” movement, the
precursors of the “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” Antony-Robbins
self-help-book crowd, any sort of magician) has apparently started
taking umbrage to some of my comments about the wild and crazy state of
the modern occultism scene, and particularly he seems to be under the
impression I’m giving Aleister Crowley too much credit. The action is
all going on over on the RPGPundit’s forum of theRPGsite, where I’ve
been posting the archived past entries of this series from my blog. The
action starts somewhere around here.

I’m willing to at least consider whether the guy has a point, in that
I’ve spoken quite a bit about how stupid a lot of the self-styled
followers of Aleister Crowley today are, but maybe in trying to explain
why Crowley is important, and has such a huge influence on both the
silly and the serious magicians of the 21st century, I lionized the guy a
bit too much and didn’t bother to talk about his flaws. There were
more than a few, but probably not the ones those who feel fear or
loathing at the mention of his name imagine: there was no
baby-sacrifices or murder, and even relatively far less abuse or
manipulation of his students than people tend to believe.

There are some areas that you could say were problematic, but that
have also been exaggerated or misrepresented. Its not fair to just
blankly paint him as a “misogynist”, for example, when in fact a lot of
what Crowley wrote about women was in the realm of radical women’s lib,
especially compared to the standard of the age. Undoubtedly, he still
did cling himself to some of the notions of his time regarding women,
but that’s hardly fair to judge, and for the most part people who accuse
him of sexism mainly do so on the basis that Crowley liked to have sex
with a lot of women, and believe that if they wanted to have sex with
him that was a good thing. Likewise, accusations of racism are
complicated: there’s no question that some of the things crowley said or
wrote would be terribly racist by today’s standards, as well as awfully
anti-semitic; but on the other hand he also kept acquaintance and
regard with people of all races, travelled the world and by all accounts
went utterly native wherever and whenever he could (something
scandalous to the typical Edwardian mentality of trying as much as
possible to avoid native culture or interaction) and was one of the
first really serious advocates of presenting esoteric concepts from the
middle east, India, and China on THEIR terms, rather than assuming these
to be at best degenerated truths from ancient caucasian, Atlantean,
Lemurian, or other non-ethnic sources.

No, from the point of view of occultism, Crowley’s flaws were more
along the lines of things like the fact that he failed to complete the
magical operation of Abramelin on the first try, something that led to
about a half-decade of disaster for him magically speaking; the fact
that he often ignored or failed to act upon the instructions he received
in his operations, essentially being a “reluctant messenger” for the
change he was himself trying to embody, and other varieties of
biting-off more than he could chew. He was also very regularly
suffering from serious material instability, and while some of his
studies on drugs (and the incredibly honest accounts he provided of
these in writing) were absolutely invaluable from the perspective of
both a magician and a “seeker of the self” in general, it was also
pretty clear that his threadbare control over himself in this department
ultimately caused him more harm than good.

There’s no question that he
was a relentless seeker of infamy; and while there’s a longstanding
tradition of this in esoteric practice (the Sufis call this the “path of
blame”, or the Tibetans call it “Crazy wisdom”) and as a technique it
probably made his memory so immortal, it also caused him and people
associated with him no end of trouble. He was bombastic at times when it
would have been wiser to be subtle, and sold himself short at times
when he should have been confident. His administrative management of
his working groups were absolutely terrible, and most damningly, he
failed to produce an effective heir for any of these groups or work;
fortunately, he turned out to be better at producing a legacy, which in a
way is more important, since groups are bound to stagnate no matter
what you do.

While he certainly had an amazing sex life, he was a hard
person to have as a friend, and in romantic relationships he was an
unmitigated disaster; but this kind of thing often goes with the
territory.

Anyways, none of this actually relates to RPGs, so I’ll stop now, but
if you’re actually more interested in the discussion from the magical
point of view, check out that thread.